Week Ahead: Tesla Battery Day to spark investor interest

Tesla hosts its long-awaited and much-hyped Battery Day on Tuesday, with investors eyeing a possible game-changing technology announcement. Meanwhile the economic data stream flows with flash PMIs for the Eurozone, a Reserve of Bank of New Zealand interest rate decision and the weekly US jobs report.

Fed chair Jay Powell and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey are both due to speak in the coming days after last week’s FOMC and MPC meetings. 

Tesla Battery Day

Tesla’s 2020 annual meeting of stockholders will be held on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, at 13:30 Pacific Time. Immediately after this meeting, Tesla will hold the Battery Day event, which has been generating equal amounts of speculation in the shares as in what CEO Elon Musk may be about to reveal. 

Our full guide to the event can be found here.

How is the economic recovery going?

Is the global economic recovery losing momentum? Whilst the snapback after lockdowns was the easy bit, it’s going to be much harder to get back to 2019 levels. Marginal gains are becoming harder to come by and some high frequency economic indicators are starting to level off. Eurozone PMIs for instance, have started to soften.

The latest round of flash manufacturing and services surveys for the Eurozone, UK and US are due on Wednesday. Meanwhile traders will be watching the weekly US jobless claims numbers as closely as ever on Thursday, while US durable goods orders on Friday offer a useful leading indicator of business demand.

How are central banks responding?

Last week the Federal Reserve and Bank of England signalled they are ready to do more as required and interest rates are set to stay low for a long time. This week sees the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in action after the country posted its worst recession in decades.

The country’s economy shrank by 12.2% between April and June, the steepest decline since the current system of measurement began in 1987 as strict national lockdown measures crippled activity.

The RBNZ has been looking at negative rates with assistant governor Christian Hawkesby saying last month that the central bank is “preparing the groundwork” for additional policy tools, which include negative rates. Will they make the leap now, or will they gauge that the economy will bounce back thanks to the very low number of cases? 

Highlights on XRay this Week 

Read the full schedule of financial market analysis and training.

Key Events this Week

Watch out for the biggest events on the economic calendar this week. A full economic and corporate events calendar is available in the platform.